Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/November 2013

Using Wikiversity to advertise payment-required education?

Today I noticed a signup for United States History, and became curious how User:MrABlair23 was handling this, because I noticed that the course page was just an outline without links to course material. What I found was that when users signed up for the course, they eventually got a notice from the teacher, this was one of them.

...each lesson is $5 and you have the option of paying daily, weekly, or the whole course up front. In order to come to these classes, you must be a member of WiZiQ. If you are interested in any other courses, please take a look at my website: http://www.mrblair.co.cc/ ....

WiZiQ is a training site that may require a registration fee.[1]. The website linked is blank. MrABlair has not been active since June, 2012. I remember his creating the courses in 2011, but the for-pay aspect did not appear until after people signed up and he told them on their talk pages. This was the his last set of edits here: July 2012.

So we have a number of courses with practically no content, that were put up as advertisement for a course elsewhere.

Remarkably, MrABlair had created, for the Human Legacy Course, a series of subpages with course content. He had blanked these and removed links to them from the course. Sidelight12 caught this and added the links. These could be better integrated with the course page, but at least they are there! It looks like MrABlair started out with a course here, then decided to shift it all elsewhere, perhaps where he could be paid.

People are still signing up for these courses, but MrABlair is no longer responding. I'll fix this, it's a piece of work, but I first wanted to get some community comment on the practice of using Wikiversity to advertise an off-wiki course that is for payment. There is at least one situation where something that could have been like this seemed to me to be more-or-less okay, but the way in which the course is set up, with solicitation of sign-up in mainspace, where students expect a free course, seems deceptive. I'll add that nobody told MrABlair not to do this, and nobody stopped or warned him when he was informing students of the fees and off-wiki site

Had MrABlair announced the course procedure on the course pages, there would have been no deception, but, then again, it would quickly have been noticed and probably stopped. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 23:55, 23 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This seems contrary to the Wikiversity mission of creating and hosting free content. It also violates the spirit and language of the proposed external links policy. I personally would recommend an indefinite block on MrABlair and edits to the associated courses to remove the solicitations. We should probably also search for similar language in other courses and see if similar tactics are in use. Perhaps we need to develop a Wikiversity:Solicitation or more properly Wikiversity:No Solicitation policy. Let us know what you want help with. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:25, 24 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are similar courses using a signup process and Engrade:

Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:43, 24 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I do not recommend a block, it would be punitive, not preventative. However, MrABlair should be warned on his user page, and email should be sent. There is some cleanup to do, and he should be at least invited to do some of it. I won't get to it myself until this weekend. There is valuable course material there, that MrABlair contributed. United States History is, if nothing else, a list of topics in U.S. History that could be used to develop a course. At this point I urge some thought about how to handle this. There is no emergency, the situation has been sitting for more than a year. The external links are on user talk pages, the ones I've seen so far. Removing those would be dicey. Yes, we should develop a workable policy. The basic problem here, though, is that nobody was watching. There were some warning signs, but ... we were all too busy with something else, and we don't have assigned responsibilities. It's a wiki problem.
I don't see any signup on World History. But it's also an abandoned course, with people still signing up.
United States Government is another MrABlair course, I'd meant to include it but somehow skipped it. It also involves, from the Talk page messages, WiZiQ signup.
Basically, we have situations -- I don't think these are the only ones -- where there is an initially committed instructor, a signup process, the instructor is gone, and nobody is paying attention. Some of these situations have been visible and nobody did anything. Not good. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 01:26, 24 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I do not like this. Using a free learning site to lure people into paying for learning (that goes against wikiversity's purpose and it's propaganda for direct profit). Delete the external links, and I'll possibly take more action. Is there a clear line between this, and paying for access to peer reviewed journals? My guess is yes, since journal material information can be included here. On the revision link, I was just trying to link subpages for functionality without realizing what happened. - Sidelight12 ^Talk 03:32, 2 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I blocked this editor for the reason that he was proactively hawking people for his for profit website.(probably didn't get enough students to be profitable anyways) If it wasn't for this, I would not have blocked. Its a disrespectful act. Feel free to discuss if there should be a reduction on the block. - Sidelight12 ^Talk 04:12, 2 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Pending Deletions

I just came across the category Pending deletions and noticed that we have 961 files with incomplete copyright or license information that are pending deletion. The backlog on processing these files appears to go back two years or more. In most cases, it appears that the user who uploaded the file has already been notified that copyright information is needed or the file may be deleted seven days after notification. There's a lot of content here, but I can't think of any legitimate way to salvage it without more information from the user who uploaded the file. Does anyone have any suggestions for addressing this content? -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 17:53, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wow! There's a lot of them. I looked at File:1.PNG, the first one. It contains several derivative calculus formulas that are at least a century old and not copyrightable. It looks like a problem set from a calculus course. The most likely problem would be if it is a screenshot from a textbook which I doubt. No course is linked to the file. User:Egm.4313.s12.team2.bblackwell also created File:2.PNG, File:3.PNG, File:2.7 Wiki2.pdf, and File:R3blackwell.pdf. The last appears to be handwritten notes (almost illegible) regarding linear differential equations. This file has been placed into the PUBLIC DOMAIN by this user and been nominated to be copied to commons. File:2.7 Wiki2.pdf is an answer set for File:1.PNG and is linked to the user page. None of the information contained on these pages is copyrightable. At the bottom of the user page is "This page was last modified on 7 February 2012, at 23:08." The same or similar information is in the Wikipedia entry on Taylor series of which Maclaurin series are a special case. The ones without copyright information could be attached to an already existing course or deleted as what they may be: homework assignments. The course is "EGM 4313 Intermediate Engineering Analysis, Spring 2012" under User:Egm4313.s12, hosted at https://sites.google.com/site/egm4313s12/home. The course is offered by Prof. Loc Vu-Quoc, University of Florida. He's using Wikiversity (User space) as a whiteboard and homework tool. Using "File:4313" as a search brings up 37 files. I believe the only files here that are copyrightable or that have a copyright are those with mistakes. The rest are public domain whether the creator likes it or not. My suggestion is to put them all in PD and link them to Ordinary differential equations which is a course. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 19:24, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

File:10.jpg is a self cartoon of Vivivan92 and File:Vi22.jpg is her picture. Delete them. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 20:29, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

File:11.jpeg is a figure for the course Psycholinguistics and probably not copyrightable as translations, but the figure presentation may be. This user Minsun created nine files: File:China123.jpg, File:Tuxiongbixian.jpg, File:Brain1.jpg, File:English.jpeg, File:Chinese.jpeg, File:Four.jpeg, File:Three.jpeg, File:Two.jpeg, and File:11.jpeg. The last four are translations. These may be abandoned contributions according to the user page. The others are artwork for which the user probably owns the copyright. If we keep them we run the risk the user returns and demands payment or a takedown. In international waters, salvage rights apply where all of these become the property of the salvager. As all are voluntarily left here my suggestion is to put them under Fair Use and link them to the course. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 20:29, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

All nine of the files contributed by user Seand23 appear to be copyrighted but may be kept by Fair use in my opinion, if anyone wants to keep them here. Otherwise delete all nine. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 20:54, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Summary of options:

Fair use those that we want to keep in case they are copyrighted, I will be happy to help with this option,
delete the clearly personal ones,
Public Domain those that are not copyrightable,
choose one of the above for any file where the uploader is gone for more than a year, or
delete them all as the easy route. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 06:13, 26 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete them all would be the easier route, but even that's a good bit of work. I like the suggestion of tagging those that provide educational value (part of a learning project) as fair use. I was playing with Lua yesterday to see how much of this processing could be automated. It looks like page reading can be automated, but updates are manual unless a bot is written. I'll see if I can write some Lua scripts that can organize the content based on where it is used. Once I can break it down by learning project vs. user space, I'll post an update. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:43, 27 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've created a list of the images pending deletion that have links from main space content pages and sorted it by content page. See Wikiversity:Resources with Files Pending Deletion. Based on User:Marshallsumter's suggestion, we might consider adding information to the files as:

{{Information

|Description = (description)

|Source = Unknown

|Date = Unknown

|Author = Unknown

|Permission = Fair Use

}}

Many of the images are clearly educational and would be justifiable in keeping under Fair Use guidelines. Is anyone willing to assist with this effort? -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 18:15, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I would be happy to help with these. It's also possible to search Google Image just to be sure with some. Others the author could be stated as the user who wrote the resource. In either case, they are Fair use, in my opinion. I can start any time unless you believe I should wait to see if anyone else comes up with points that are contrary. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 19:11, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

User:1sfoerster has indicated that the Howard Community College project images should be deleted. That actually covers a majority of these. I would encourage anyone that wants to help to start down the list and add Fair Use information to the files for any learning projects that interest them. I'll start working on removing HCC projects from the list. At some point I will post an RFD for whatever's left over, as well as confirm that all users who submitted content were notified of the missing information and pending deletions. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 21:16, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

File:Blast main.jpg, licensing info added, source found using Google Image. Check it out! Comments, criticism welcome. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 23:21, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

File:Assama.jpg, ditto. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 23:36, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

File:Asama1.jpg, licensing info added, source and author not found. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 00:18, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Good finds on these images! I hadn't tried the Google image search before. It works well, but it's a lot of effort for each search to find a likely source. I like the way you've added the image information and the {{fairuse}} tag. My only question is whether the last line indicating where the file is used is necessary. To me that seems like unnecessary maintenance, since the file page already indicates where the file is being used.

Above I indicated that much of the content was from Howard Community College. It isn't. They have a portion of it, but most of the links are from University of Florida engineering classes. I emailed the instructor and it is his preference that the material be retained as fair use. Unfortunately, he didn't also offer to help in the tagging effort. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 13:38, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

File:Bdkraem ram.jpg, licensing info added, source found using Google Image. Check it out! Comments, criticism welcome. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 00:29, 31 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

File:CognativeTheoryMML.jpg, licensing info added, source found using Google Image. Check it out! Comments, criticism welcome. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 00:54, 31 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

File:Idea Workshop Instructions.pdf, licensing info added, image not found using Google Image. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 01:35, 31 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

To keep the problem from getting any worse, I reviewed all files needing license information and tagged any that were uploaded after 1 July 2013 and added a notice on the talk page of all users who had uploaded files without information during this time period. It's become clear that the problem revolves around semester timing. There were almost no files without information uploaded over the northern hemisphere summer. The uploads occur September - December and February - May. At this point, my plan is to finish tagging the remaining files in November and then post an RFD in mid December, with the intent that nothing be removed until January 2014. At that point all of the semester classes are complete, and everyone will have had several months to update any images they want to save. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:36, 1 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

File:Mobile Creativity Instructions.pdf, licensing info added, image not found using Google Image.

File:Peterkelly.JPG, licensing info added, image not found using Google Image.

File:R4222.png, licensing info added, image not found using Google Image. It Takes about 15 minutes at most to do three. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 02:29, 1 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

File:Table2.1.JPG, licensing info added,

File:Taylor series 442 code.jpg, licensing info added, and

File:Taylor series 442 graph.jpg, licensing info added. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 15:39, 2 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I now have a script I can use to identify content pages with files pending deletion. It's probably not necessary to list individual updates here anymore. Just let me know whenever you want the list cleaned up again. Note that as I process more files with missing information, the list will grow. Fortunately, some of the current users are now adding information with their new uploads, so we are making progress. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 04:27, 3 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A Request For Deletion has been posted on the files pending deletion. Everyone please comment there. Thanks! -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 01:26, 9 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

New User

I am a new user in this section. It is very important for me because represent a new experience.I would like to learn more about the quality of education Spoken today in the Education Quality an issue that involves all participants in the educational process. It requires real commitment and change of mentality. Quality is an issue for everyone. EMendieta

WikiJournal: A Project Proposal

I have a project proposal that will blend in well with Wikiversity. There are plenty of people with a lot of ingenious ideas but cannot make it past the rigorous criteria demanded by higher educational systems all over the world; be it financial, past-performance, geographical limitations and so on. Such a system seems to be regressive towards the prospects of advancing human knowledge, especially with regard to its potential. It is my understanding that an easily accessible and reputed format such as this would be a perfect platform to deliver to, and enable anyone, to contribute to the body of documented, tested and confirmed human knowledge.

WikiJournal can be a three-tiered publishing format for generating peer reviewed scholarly articles that are at par with contemporary scholarly research. The publishing format will be broken down as follows:

Tier I: Content generation: An article will be written based on the knowledge, hypothesis, intuition or any other form of cognition at the disposal of the writer. The writer must follow a format that would clearly index his article under an academic sub-category so as to enable people to browse efficiently. Other criteria can also be introduced such as 'Hypothesis', 'Speculation', 'Contradiction' - perhaps with reference to the existing framework of knowledge.

Tier II: Evidence: Each article, once published under 'Tier I' must be backed up by evidence. This sounds like a traditional wikipedia page but it should be edited by professionals within the specific field and/or by individuals who have an authoritative understanding of the subject at hand and/or have access to knowledge, understanding or data that would assist in supplementing the article. The in-text referencing process should follow an acceptable traditional format so as to enable it to be eligible for Tier III.

Tier II: Peer-review: Once each article is certified to be complete in the previous stage of publishing, it can be subjected to peer-review by academics by aligning the content with mainstream academia and/or making it readily available for the same. The quality of editing in Tier II will determine the success at this level. After the successful implementation of such a system, WikiJournal could become a staple stream of human knowledge fueling academics with the best minds off the grid.

WikiJournal: All pier-reviewed articles enter into the database of WikiJournal that serves as the digital library within the Wikiversity. The aim should be to make the project acceptable by all educational institutions as a trusted source that could be used to supplement additional research by any student. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rijulb (talk • contribs)

Where will all this activity take place, and who will do it? Right now, anyone can create resources here, and resources can include "articles," i.e, research papers. There is no procedure for requiring content format. You would be free to define a format, and people will follow it or not. There is no policy governing such matters.
When you have a "must" there must be some enforcement, or it's meaningless. How will rules be determined and who will enforce them?
Who will review the articles, and how will it come to be that there is any consistency in this?
What process determines eligibility for entry into the database of Wikijournal*

All these questions can be answered, and it could be done today, if someone wants to do the work, and does it with sufficient skill and energy. Wikiversity policies allow such a thing, as I interpret them. But I'm not going to bother explaining how if nobody is ready to actually implement it. I'm working on demonstrations of the first steps. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 23:53, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikiversity doesn't have the resources to do this, and it is really a mess. It would also be difficult to peer review a constantly changing project. The idea of peer review appeals to me. Could the material be copied to an organization that can provide some form of peer review provided the license and Wikiversity as the source is followed? An alternative is to index by category, articles that meet a standard (aside from featured), including peer review by month and year. - Sidelight12 ^Talk 03:13, 2 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Like the concept - haven't read the detail. Start a project page up? I'm guessing the resourcing in some cases could come from an engaged class/teacher for particular topics/sessions. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 00:58, 3 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The “constant changes” isn’t really a problem – the discussions are routinely archived, and we can grant the “published” papers roughly the same status as that of the archive pages.

As for the reviews, I’d propose a new peerreview user flag to be granted to the Wikiversity users “qualified” for the task. The exact conditions for that deserve a separate discussion, but could roughly be as follows:

the username of the user matches his or her “real” name (preferrably), or the real name is made public by the user on his or her respective user page;
the user has works published in peer-review media in one or more fields, as determined by searching for the (presumed) real name in one or more bibliographic databases;
the user wrote at least $n$ ( $n\gtrsim 3$ ) preliminary reviews on the WikiJournal submissions, which are either approved by at least $m$ ( $m\gtrsim 1$ ) fellow reviewers in the same field, or seem to show reasonable understanding of the subject if there are no such reviewers at the time; this latter criteria is to allow for the project to be “bootstrapped.”

(On my part, I’ll try to approach a few theoretical physicists I personally know to participate in this project as reviewers.)

The submission is to be accepted when a (“positive”) review is published by a qualified user, the author files formal request to do so, and the reviewer supports the request in the discussion. The work may be semi-protected at this point, and is added to a (protected or semi-protected) list of WikiJournal publications by an authorized user (IOW, a custodian at this point, although later a separate group may be established for the task.) It may be advised for those citing WikiJournal publications to use permanent links to the respective pages.

The particular style or styles may be chosen in the due course, as the reviews and submissions (and actual publications) accumulate. The style manuals may then be established, following the usual Wikiversity process, perhaps with the additional requirement of approval of the

The enforcement of the rules is (as usual) the responsibility of the custodians.

The project is likely to require a few templates (e. g.: {{review}}, {{preliminary review}}, {{published}}) and userboxes.

— Ivan Shmakov (d ▞ c) 11:37, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve revised some of my points above and wrote a draft covering the peer review process suggested. — Ivan Shmakov (d ▞ c) 16:50, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Introducting Beta Features

(Apologies for writing in English. Please translate if necessary)

We would like to let you know about Beta Features, a new program from the Wikimedia Foundation that lets you try out new features before they are released for everyone.

Think of it as a digital laboratory where community members can preview upcoming software and give feedback to help improve them. This special preference page lets designers and engineers experiment with new features on a broad scale, but in a way that's not disruptive.

Beta Features is now ready for testing on MediaWiki.org. It will also be released on Wikimedia Commons and MetaWiki this Thursday, 7 November. Based on test results, the plan is to release it on all wikis worldwide on 21 November, 2013.

Here are the first features you can test this week:

Media Viewer — view images in large size or full screen
VisualEditor Formulæ (for wikis with VisualEditor) — edit algebra or equations on your pages
Typography Refresh — make text more readable (coming Thursday)

Would you like to try out Beta Features now? After you log in on MediaWiki.org, a small 'Beta' link will appear next to your 'Preferences'. Click on it to see features you can test, check the ones you want, then click 'Save'. Learn more on the Beta Features page.

After you've tested Beta Features, please let the developers know what you think on this discussion page -- or report any bugs here on Bugzilla. You're also welcome to join this IRC office hours chat on Friday, 8 November at 18:30 UTC.

Beta Features was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's Design, Multimedia and VisualEditor teams. Along with other developers, they will be adding new features to this experimental program every few weeks. They are very grateful to all the community members who helped create this project — and look forward to many more productive collaborations in the future.

Enjoy, and don't forget to let developers know what you think! Keegan (WMF) (talk) 19:48, 5 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Distributed via Global message delivery (wrong page? Correct it here), 19:48, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Being a rollbacker

I would like to be a rollbacker because there has been vandalism all around Wikiversity, and I am tired of seeing "Goldenburg undoed changes by 103.91.11.1178. I have also been creating books (see on my userpage). --goldenburg (talk) 23:22, 7 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Rollback is not a separate function on Wikiversity. When I asked for rollback, it was suggested that I become a custodian. I did that, and the rest is history. I suggest, Goldenburg, that you aren't quite ready for that, though you are on your way. Rollback saves a small amount of time, not much. You can quickly delete all that standard edit summary from Undo and just type "rvv," for "revert vandalism." If you need to delete more than one revision by a vandal, just go back to the page before the multiple edits and edit and save that with rvv as an edit summary. It's almost as fast as rollback. Rollback can be a bit of a nuisance, I've hit the rollback button by accident when viewing changes in history. Bang! Done! --Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:55, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

`journal = Wiktionary`?

I’m seeing a plenty of links to Wiktionary entries with {{Cite journal}}, and, well, I’m puzzled: aren’t that template for articles in academic journals? (Which Wiktionary is not. Or at least was not the last time I’ve checked.) Wouldn’t it be easier (and clearer) to just link to the word entries with [[wikt:word]]? Or perhaps there’s one another template to fill the role? TIA. — Ivan Shmakov (d ▞ c) 18:20, 9 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your interest. I am in the process of changing these entries with {{cite journal}} to entries with {{cite web}} for Wiktionary, Wikipedia, and Wikiversity. Many of my lectures/articles use definitions where I prefer to indicate the sources such as Wiktionary. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 22:52, 9 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, I’d consider the material of most of the WMF projects to be essentially self-published (or perhaps “community-published”), rather than publisher = Wikimedia Foundation, Inc, for WMF has only indirect control over the content. — Ivan Shmakov (d ▞ c) 07:46, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Mmm. Wiktionary really should not be "cited," as Ivan suggests. it's a tertiary source moving target. It can be linked easily.
[[wikt:House|]] displays House, or without the pipe and with the full wiki name it becomes Wiktionary:House.
If a wiki has content that is, itself, the topic, i.e., one is describing some particular version there, as an example of what some might think, then one would link to a permanent version, not to the current version, the default. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:07, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This Month in GLAM: October 2013

This Month in GLAM – Volume III, Issue X, October 2013
Headlines>
Australia and New Zealand report: WikiTowns, Wikitakes, using railways and murder in extending reach Czech Republic report: New GLAM project in the Czech Republic France report: Working on metadata; Symposium on the public domain; News from GLAM in Rennes Germany report: "Shaping access!" Italy report: Bibliohackathon and shoes Mexico report: Day of the Dead photo contest Netherlands report: Edit-a-thon design Spain report: Pictures of and interviews with swimmers Sweden report: Reverse upload, Shoes and NHB USA report: GLAM-Wiki Activities in New York; edit-a-thon in Portland Open Access report: Open Access Week, Accelerating Science Award Calendar: November's GLAM events
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Pakistan clj

I am confused about Pakistan clj, its title! I mean, we can delete Pakistan and replace Pakistan clj with Pakistan! --goldenburg (talk) 00:48, 15 November 2013 (UTC

clj refers to Comparative law and justice. It would appear that country pages that didn't exist were created as is, and country pages that already existed when the CLJ project started were created with a clj extension. I'll move the clj-specific pages under the learning project for now. Anyone who wishes can look at merging content on subjects that interest them. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 02:01, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Correct link for the clj version is now Comparative_law_and_justice/Pakistan. All content links to this page have been corrected. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 02:42, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Matters of style

BTW, I’m seeing a few stylistic (formatting) choices on the Wikiversity pages, which seem somewhat unfortunate. I wonder if these serve some particular purpose I’m unaware of?

Explicit numbering of headings, as in: == 5. Another example == or == Task 1: Frobnicate knobs ==. These will require renumbering should new sections be addeded (unless appended to the end of the respective parent section or page), and such renumbering will also break all the existing [[#Section]] links.
The use of first-level headings, as in: = Hello, world! = (which translate to XHTML <h1 />.) My understanding was that such headings are generally reserved for the title of the page as a whole.
Formatting the list items : - like this as a way to use a “custom” item marker – readily interfering with the user’s own style.
Somewhat excessive use of <br />, including the cases where plain lists seem perfectly appropriate, as in: Foo<br>Bar<br>Baz. (My opinion is that the use of <br /> should be reserved to exceptional cases, and generally happen only within templates.)
Linking to PDF files with [[File:example.pdf]] instead of [[:File:example.pdf]], thus making it harder for the user to use the PDF viewer “embedded” into the MediaWiki software itself.

Also, I wonder if there’s any reason to avoid <code /> for command line examples (and other code fragments) and use, say, boldface instead (as used on some Wikiversity pages)?

TIA.

— Ivan Shmakov (d ▞ c) 08:24, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Some formatting choices are made intentionally, based on the belief that the given style provides a better learning experience for the target audience. Other formatting choices are either unintentional or uninformed, based on the experience of the content developer. Please feel free to use the talk page of any projects that interest you to discuss formatting issues with those already working on the project. If no one has been active recently and you don't get a response in a few days, feel free to make corrections as you see fit. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:02, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This Month in Education: November 2013

This Month in Education – Volume 2, Issue 11, November 2013
Headlines>
EduWiki Conference 2013 convenes in Cardiff Notes from Tec de Monterrey-Mexico City Campus "Students Write Wikipedia" in the Czech Republic again Plagiarism study results released More than 50 gather to celebrate third Egypt term Feedback sought on new Welcome to Wikipedia draft Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2013 in Berlin Articles of Interest in other publications
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If this message is not on your home wiki's talk page, update your subscription · Distributed via Global message delivery, 22:40, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Call for comments on draft trademark policy

Hi all,

The Wikimedia legal team invites you to participate in the development of the new Wikimedia trademark policy.

The current trademark policy was introduced in 2009 to protect the Wikimedia marks. We are now updating this policy to better balance permissive use of the marks with the legal requirements for preserving them for the community. The new draft trademark policy is ready for your review here, and we encourage you to discuss it here.

We would appreciate if someone would translate this message into your language so more members of your community can contribute to the conversation.

Thanks,
Yana & Geoff

Looking for model completed courses to guide course creation

What courses are good models for current best practices, including quizzes and exams?

Is there a category or list of completed courses?

I want to use the Introduction to Myth course my next semester's Classical Mythology course. However, it needs to be written from the ground up, as well as a name change, I think.

I found Fundamentals_of_Neuroscience as a possible model, but it is hard to determine if anything else is out there.

Thanks!

--Kenmayer (discuss • contribs) 14:20, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome Kenmayer! Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Each of us seems to prefer our own approach to course design. You'll need to look around at the different examples and decide what works best for you and your students. You can narrow the choices by looking at Category:Courses, Category:Featured resources, Category:Completed resources, and perhaps Category:Nearly complete resources. You can see Category:Quizzes for examples of quizzes.

Introduction to Myth appears to be abandoned. You can use the Move tool to rename it. Just leave a redirect behind, as there are several other pages that link to it.

Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 17:24, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you!--Kenmayer (discuss • contribs) 19:55, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]